EVGA Z68 FTW Motherboard Review

EVGA Z68 FTW Motherboard Layout

The EVGA Z68 FTW motherboard is tricked out in a red and black color scheme. Overall I would have to admit that it is a sharp looking motherboard.

The most prominent feature that stands out from the crowd in this particular corner of the EVGA Z68 FTW motherboard is the 24 pin motherboard power. Unlike most boards the 24 pin motherboard power comes out parallel to the motherboard rather than perpendicular. It will make the cable management that much cleaner looking without a bundle of wires sticking up out of the board. Just above the 24 pin motherboard power is a feature that I haven’t seen before is a compact flash slot. The CF slot can be used for storage, a swap file, or anything else you can think of! The standard features on the EVGA Z68 FTW that we can see here is four DIMM slots that will run a maximum of 16Gb of RAM at 2133MHz. To the left of the 24 pin motherboard power is a series of six jumpers, these will enable or disable the PCIe X16 expansion slots.

The EVGA Z68 FTW motherboard features six SATA ports. Two of which are SATA III 6Gbps controlled by the Intel Chipset while the remaining four are SATA II 3Gbps. Moving to the left of the SATA ports we have the pin out for the front panel. Moving our eyes up the edge of the EVGA Z68 FTW is an internal SuperSpeed USB 3.0 header, a 4pin system fan header, and three internal USB 2.0 headers. The Debug LED also doubles as a temperature read out for the CPU once the system completes the P.O.S.T..

Swinging the EVGA Z68 FTW motherboard around, we can see that it is loaded with six PCIe X16 slots and a single PCIe X1 slot. To the immediate left of the PCIe X1 slot we have a 4pin Molex power to supply additional voltage the the PCIe X16 slots when running multiple graphics cards in SLI or CrossFireX. Along the edge of the EVGA Z68 FTW we have an onboard clear CMOS button, power button and a reset button. Just to the south of the onboard buttons is a switch that will toggle the EVGA Z68 FTW between three different BIOS chips. Just past the BIOS switch is an onboard system speaker. On the leading edge of the EVGA Z68 FTW we have an 686 AMIBIOS XG46 2862 BIOS chip, pin out for the front panel audio, Realtek ALC889 High Definition Audio Codec, and a pair of Marvell 88E8057 Gigabit Ethernet controllers.

The rear I/O panel of the EVGA Z68 FTW features eight USB ports. Six of the USB ports are USB 2.0 while the remaining two blue USB ports are SuperSpeed USB 3.0. We also have a pair of RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet jacks, Firewire, a pair of eSATA 3Gbps ports, the typical six audio jacks, and a clear CMOS button. The EVGA Z68 FTW is capable of running dual eight pin CPU power plugs. Fortunately only one is required under 99% of circumstances.